If the Tarquins’ power was really commercial in origin, and if the account of it in writers of the age of Livy is in the main outline historical, then the facts ought to be found influencing the history of the early republic and in particular the measures taken by the aristocrats to prevent the restoration of the monarchy. What is in fact the sort of situation represented as most alarming them from this point of view? [Sidenote: Collatinus and his wealth and “benevolences”;] The first indication of the direction of their fears is to be found in the account of Collatinus’ banishment, recorded by Livy as having taken place in the first year of the republic. According to Livy[1178] it was simply the hated name of Tarquin that led to his banishment. Collatinus was reluctant to withdraw: he only did so from fear that later, when no longer consul, the same fate might overtake him with the loss of his property into the bargain—cum bonorum amissione. Livy does not always work over his material sufficiently to make it quite harmonize with his own interpretation of it. It looks as though it was the bona, the wealth of Collatinus, that led to his expulsion. Though plainly not the strongest influence in Rome at the time, it may have been sufficiently strong to be a perpetual menace to the aristocratic government. It is the “primores ciuitatis” who insist on his withdrawal. If in Dionysius[1179] on another occasion Collatinus is made to argue “that it was not the tyrants’ money that had been harming the city, but their persons,” the protestation only shows that there were others who did not share this view, but thought rather, with Dionysius’ Marcus Valerius, that there was a danger lest the people, “beguiled by the tyrant’s benevolences, ... should help to restore Tarquin to the throne[1180].” The same view is implied in a speech put by Dionysius[1181] into the mouth of one of the popular leaders at the time of the first secession. He reminds his hearers that “the people were never put to any disadvantage by the kings, and least of all by the last ones”: he recalls an occasion on which the king had “distributed five minae of silver to every man,” and reminds the patricians how the plebeians had rejected the great gifts that the banished Tarquins had offered them as an inducement to break faith with the patrician government.